Governmental reforms since the early 1990s have acted as a push factor for starting new schools in Sweden and have created options for pupils to choose a school irrespective of municipal borders. This study highlights the upper secondary school system in small municipalities in northern Sweden since the late 1990s. The analysis shows that the…

In this scholarly commentary, the author examines the major reasons U.S. charter schools have closed since 1992. The commentary provides examples of charter school failures in high-frequency areas, such as financial and organizational mismanagement, and academic underperformance; it further identifies two subcategories of academic risk:…

Educators and policymakers are paying increased attention to the academic outcomes of students in the middle grades (i.e., Grades 6-8). One reform proposed to improve outcomes for these students is to replace middle schools (with Grade 6-8, 7-8, or 7-9 configurations) with K-8 schools. This longitudinal study evaluated the effects of continuously…

This study assesses the effects of three aspects of school organization--student enrollment, student-teacher ratio, and the number of different students taught--on the property and personal victimization experiences of students. It hypothesizes that smaller schools, schools with lower ratios of students to adults, and schools in which the number…

The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) partnered to examine five different models initiated by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in 36 schools. CPS was an early adopter of dramatic intervention strategies in low-performing schools, and the reforms in this study were implemented…

Using the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey Public Charter School Questionnaire (U.S. Department of Education, 2000), this article provides an in-depth description of charter schools in the United States and presents multivariate analyses of the enrollment of low-income and minority students in the population of charter schools, taking into…